Led by Senator Mark Doumit and the Senate's Ways and Means Committee, Washington State
has a chance to act in a profoundly wise manner. They will join other wise legislators across the country who have not been
fooled by Pentagon's and Republican adminisration's shush-now pooh-poohing of the serious, tragic and potentially calamitous
medical /financial impact of the use of depleted uranium in American weaponry in Iraq and the Middle East.

Earlier last year, the Connecticut House voted 144-0 to approve the kind of legislation
Doumit and company gave life to and moved closer to the Governor's desk for signature.

Depleted Uranium is not a figmentary notion in the minds of conspiracy theorists - the sort
of people easily dismissed and discredited by political manipulators and suppressed by Pentagon authorities.

More and more attention is drawn to this issue requiring that more and more authorities
address the issue; a situation that itself debunks the old DU-debunking in the early years of the war.

Bored on a Saturday moving into the afternoon, out of curiosity I googled "depleted uranium
victims" and rather than click "web" on Google, I clicked "images."

What came up included victim pictures of greater tragedy and criminality than anything
we've seen in the original and now recent 2nd issuances of photos from Abu Ghraib.

These D.U. pictures are so numerous, one can only conclude the legitimacy of the problem or
fall back on a stubborn insistence that camera-clickers from all over the world have conspired to attempt the most massive
and hideous fraud ever perpetrated.

Denying and refusing to believe the D.U. tragedy will eventually be tantamount to denying
the Holocaust.

After seeing those pictures, I again googled "depleted uranium" and clicked on "web" to
see how easily one can become informed about whether or not our legislature is wasting time by looking into DU effects on
our National Guard and the regular military members who reside in this state.

Well, I'll tell ya ... Our legislators are not wasting time. Any who try to diminish the
effort or its importance have been just plain been lazy ... too lazy to even Google.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current
events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com.

Lengthy yes, but - I promise you - an article worth reading in its entirety.

The Killing Fields

Meanwhile, all around Iraq and its cities a clandestine yet deadly killer lurks, invisible and
unseen, devastating in its capacity to destroy human DNA, a silent death sentence that has and will befall hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of unsuspecting human beings, both Iraqi and American.

This killer festers in the air, water, food supply, vegetation and ground, infiltrating the
porous bodies of human beings, cementing itself for life.

It lingers on streets and rivers and buildings and homes, carried by wind and rain and
through the daily weather patterns of Mesopotamia.

... Depleted uranium is a silent mass murderer, a clandestine nuclear bomb whose mushroom cloud
is never seen exploding, yet the radiation and heavy metals excreted from the weapons it envelopes when they strike their
target, the heat evaporating uranium particulates into the air, become airborne contagions that latch onto our carbon and
organic bodies.

... Depleted uranium used fifteen years ago is now being felt where American ordnance
was dropped from the sky above, as lands, food supply, water and air once contaminated, inhaled and ingested release the WMD
lingering in their midst.

Child deformities, stillbirths, mutated fetuses, miscarriages and birth defects have been springing
up for quite some time now, as the DU embedded in the sperm and eggs of parents transfers over to the embryo.

The mutations taking place, along with the deformities now apparent yet hardly ever seen in
human society, are gross distortions of human normalcy, creating beings the likes of which have never been seen before. The
photos of what DU can do to newborn babies and fetuses are available on the Internet.

Entire regions, towns and neighborhoods are experiencing clusters of these mutations in
their newly born babies, with doctors unable to explain the sudden rise in defects and deformities that did not exist previously.

... Iraq has been transformed into a vast killing field, a wasteland overrun by the remnants
of America's silent WMD, a cheap and money saving weapon...

... Already, 11,000 American soldiers, veterans of the first Gulf War, have died thanks to Gulf
War Syndrome, cancer and disease. Over 350,000 veterans, out of 700,000 who served, have asked for serious disability, most
of these veterans being in their late twenties and early thirties, in the prime of their lives, cleared as healthy before
the war in military conducted medical physicals.

Depleted Uranium is the most likely culprit, as many more get diagnosed with terminal
diseases and illnesses every year. Many veterans of Gulf War One and now the Iraq/Bush War have themselves been giving birth
to deformed and defective children, much like their Iraqi counterparts.

Depleted Uranium, it seems, does not discriminate nor does it need a passport to infect human
beings. It has been imported into America by our returning soldiers, a great percentage of which most likely have remnants
of depleted uranium buried deep inside them.

How many American veterans of Gulf War One and the Iraq/Bush War will in the next few
decades succumb to cancer or destroyed immune systems? How many of their children will be born like those in Iraq, unable
to live more than a few days or months because their bodies are infested with DU, their appearance no longer presenting the
appearance of a human child?

It is estimated that 40,000 to 80,000 more veterans will die in the next twenty to thirty years
as the effects of DU run their course. How many more will produce offspring with genetic birth defects, gross mutations of
fetuses, miscarriages and stillborns?

... In their whispered plea can we also see what might happen to tens of thousands of
our own men and women, themselves hosts carrying the demons of the Iraqi Killing Fields back home.

Is the price of what America has done in our name worth our silence and indifference?

So what happens when we question the leaders who have done this on our behalf and in our
name?

Valenzuela is a gifted writer who captures passion in his words and expresses that passion
well.

To supplement Valensuela's thoughts, I recommend the following as well.